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Rhavas was a good, holy, and pious man-and the cousin of the Avtokrator. He would probably have become ecumenical patriarch of the Empire in the capital, Videssos the city . . . if his world had not suddenly and tragically fallen apart when the Empire of Videssos erupted into civil war and the Khamorth barbarians swarm over the borders. As the home he loved was brutally sacked, Rhavas had to flee for his life, then make his way through lands swarming with fierce nomads and with soldiers loyal both to his cousin and to the rebel. He may never see Videssos the city again, let alone preside in its High Temple. He has always followed Phos, the god of light and goodness, Videssos' god, and despised evil rival Skotos. Those who fall off the Bridge of the Separator during judgment in the afterlife tumble down to Skotes' ice forevermore. But when evil seems to have swallowed the whole world, what is a cleric who reverences logic as well as goodness supposed to believe? It's a harder question than Rhavas wishes it were.

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Bridge of the Separator

Baen Books

Chapter One

Old Neboulos, the ecumenical patriarch of Videssos, finally had to take him aside and talk sense into him. Gorgeous in a cloth-of-gold robe with Phos' sun picked out in shining blue silk on the left breast, Neboulos sat Rhavas down in the study of the patriarchal residence, close by the High Temple. The patriarch's long, bushy white beard wagged as he poured wine for both of them with his own hand.

"This is not exile," Neboulos insisted. "It is not-I swear it by the lord with the great and good mind. It is opportunity."

"Easy for you to say," Rhavas insisted. "You don't have to go." He was in his mid-twenties then, but remained unintimidated by Neboulos' rank and by his years. Rhavas was tall and thin, with a long, narrow axe blade of a face, a dagger of a nose, and brilliant black eyes under elegant, aristocratic eyebrows. His tonsure only made his forehead seem evenhigher than it would have anyway. He was one of the most brilliant clerics, maybe the most brilliant, of his generation, and he knew it very well.

So did Neboulos, who made a placating gesture before lifting his silver goblet. "Drink, drink," the patriarch urged.

With an angry gesture, Rhavas took hold of his goblet, which matched the other. Both were decorated with reliefs of Phos, the god of light and goodness, triumphant over his eternal rival Skotos, who dwelt in eternal ice and darkness and worked evil. Rhavas and Neboulos raised their hands in reverence and intoned the good god's creed: "We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind, by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor."

Together, they spat in ritual rejection of Skotos. Only then could Rhavas drink. Not even his ferocious temper kept him from noting that Neboulos had served him very fine wine. He wants to soften me, to butter me up, the younger man thought savagely. Well, to the ice with me if I aim to let him.

"Opportunity?" Rhavas laced the word with scorn. "Where is there ever opportunity outside Videssos the city?"

"By the good god, Rhavas, opportunity is where you find it." Neboulos sketched Phos' sun-circle above his heart to show he was serious. "You were born here in the capital; perhaps this is not so plain to you. But I come from Resaina, in the westlands. I rose there. Had I not risen there, I would not sit here now." He ran a hand down his glittering patriarchal vestments, which seemed out of place in the comfortably shabby, scroll-filled study.

"Yes, yes," Rhavas said, still full of rage and impatience. "But I am here. I can rise here. Does Skopentzana have a decent library? Does it have a library at all? How am I supposed to study the good god and his glory without the tools of scholarship?"

"Skopentzana will have books. Skopentzana is rich, rich in many things," Neboulos answered. "Among the things it is rich in is the chance for you to administer a major temple. You will not find that chance so easy to come by here in the capital, no matter how high your blood is."

"Oh." Rhavas was suddenly thoughtful. Now he had to fight to hold on to his anger. And fight he did. "Running a temple never did seem all that exciting to me. I'd sooner follow Phos than lead men."

"But, my dear ..." For a moment, Neboulos seemed at a loss how to go on. He stroked his unkempt white beard. That seemed to give him whatever he needed, for he went on, "As you see, I am old. I shall not be patriarch much longer."

"Most holy sir, may you live a hundred and twenty years!" Rhavas exclaimed.

"You are kind to say such a thing. Believe me, I am grateful, but I shall not live a hundred and twenty years. At my age, one does not commence a long exegesis on Phos' holy scriptures. I do not know who will succeed me; that is for the synod and the Avtokrator to decide. But I have a good notion of who may succeed my successor."

"You do? How?" To Rhavas, the patriarch's speech was as opaque as if he'd suddenly started using the language of the sea-roving Haloga barbarians who dwelt beyond even distant Skopentzana.

Rhavas always remembered how Neboulos smiled at his naïveté. "Who? Why, you, of course." The ecumenical patriarch's right forefinger was bent with age, but not too bent to point straight at Rhavas' chest.

"Me?" Rhavas' voice rose to a startled squeak. "I never wanted to be patriarch. I never thought to be patriarch. Why me?"

"Your modesty does you credit, holy sir." Neboulos chuckled rheumily. "Why you? You are a learned man. You are a wise man. If you will forgive an old man's observation, you are wiser and more learned than you have any business being at your age. That is one side of the goldpiece. The other side is, you have a connection to the imperial family. The Avtokrator is likely to want a man who can run the temples well and is not inclined to quarrel with him."

"He may not get what he wants." Rhavas had a prickly sense of honor and an even pricklier sense of duty. "I will do what I find right and what I find proper, come what may."

"I understand," Neboulos said. "Blood calls to blood even so. My guess is, you will be patriarch-provided you do what you need to do before you don the golden robe. You must be watchful beforehand that the great test is decided in your favor." He smiled at using the words of the creed in a new context.

By contrast, Rhavas frowned. He suspected frivolity there. No matter what he suspected, he didn't let it deter him from his main point: "Why send me to Skopentzana, then?"

"How can you hope to run all the temples if you have not shown you can run at least one?" Neboulos replied. "There is the reason behind it-to let you run a temple and to teach you to run one. Having proved you can do that, you will, I doubt not, be recalled to Videssos the city before too long. Someday, you will plop your fundament onto this ratty old couch. When you do, I pray you, think of me every once in a while."

For some little while, Rhavas didn't know what to say to that. At last, softly, he asked, "You believe in your heart I should do this thing?"

Neboulos sketched the sun-circle once more. "By the lord with the great and good mind, my son, I do. Videssos will have need of you in years to come. The faith will have need of you as well. I could command you. However proud you may be, I am still your superior in matters ecclesiastical. But I do not command here. I beg."

Rhavas bent his head. "So be it, then. Let the good god's will be done."

* * *

Fifteen years went by. After a few of them, Neboulos passed from this world, his spirit walking the narrow Bridge of the Separator to see whether it gained Phos' heaven or fell down, down, down to Skotos' eternal ice. His successor, a certain Kameniates, was translated to Videssos the city from the westlands town of Amorion, where he had been prelate.

So far as Rhavas knew, Kameniates remained in good health. That perturbed the prelate of Skopentzana much less than it would have when he first came to the far northeast of the Empire. He had made his peace with this, his new hometown. It was not Videssos the city. Nothing else in the Empire, nothing else in the world-not even Mashiz, the capital of Videssos' western rival, Makuran-came close to Videssos the city.

But Skopentzana was itself. Before coming here, Rhavas would have denied that any place outside the imperial city could have an identity of its own, a character of its own. Everything beyond the great, unconquerable walls was simply ... the provinces, as far as he was concerned. The provinces were a dreary place where nothing interesting ever happened, where no one had or wanted to have a new thought, and where shepherds were likely to get to know their ewes altogether too well.

He had learned better now. Skopentzana had a lively life of the mind, though not exactly of the sort he had known in Videssos the city. Here, they thought men from the capital provincial because those men knew nothing of what went on in Halogaland to the north or among the Khamorth nomads on the vast plains of Pardraya to the west. Even poetry was different here. Imitating Haloga models, it gave more weight to alliteration and assonance, less to rhyme, than verse did in the capital. Rhavas had tried his hand at the local style a few times, and won praise from men whose judgment he respected.

He hadn't expected that when he came. He also hadn't expected that Skopentzana would be beautiful. But beautiful it was, though beautiful in ways that had nothing to do with the majesty of the capital's seven hills. The River Anazarbos ran singing to the sea past this city. Every other poem in these parts talked about the river and its banks of golden sand. Rhavas would have got sick of the poetry if it didn't tell the truth. There were times when he got sick of the poetry anyway, but that was only because he had too much of the critic in him.

Dark woods of fir and spruce, winters that came early and lingered late, long misty days of summer when it seemed as if the sun would never set ... The sunlight had a peculiarly rich tone in the north, one made more intense by the yellow sandstone from which so much of Skopentzana was built. Rhavas had to get used to the steep pitch of the roofs. As soon as he saw snow slide down them, he understood.

He also had to get used to preaching in the temple that, with the city eparch's residence, formed two sides of Skopentzana's central square. Most temples throughout the Empire, from what he had heard, modeled themselves after the magnificent High Temple in the capital. He'd expected one more provincial copy here, and braced himself to judge it by how nearly it approached its prototype.

What he hadn't expected was that the chief temple in Skopentzana was as old as the High Temple, and as different from it as bread and beer. (He'd had to get used to beer, too, as wine was an expensive import in these parts where grapes wouldn't grow. He learned to drink the bitter brew. He never learned to like it.) The High Temple's great dome mounted on pendentives was a wonder of the world. The marvelous mosaic of Phos stern in judgment inside the dome was another.

Skopentzana's chief temple had no central dome. When Rhavas first saw it, he exclaimed, "It looks as if someone used an upside-down ship for the roof!" Ships were on his mind then. He'd been seasick much of the way up from Videssos the city, and the vessel that carried him on the last leg of the journey had to outrace Haloga pirates to safety.

In fact, as he found out later, he wasn't so far wrong. One of the inspirations for the temple was a Haloga longhouse, and longhouses often were roofed with ships too decrepit to put to sea. It made for a different sort of building and, in some ways, a different sort of service. In the High Temple, the altar was at the very center of things, under the dome, with worshipers all around in equal numbers. Here there were worshipers in front and behind, but very few to the sides. The priests who served the altar necessarily adapted to the shape of the building they used.

On the day when Rhavas' life changed forever, he was standing in the central square, between the eparch's residence and the temple. Statues of locally famous Videssians crowded the square. Largest was a great bronze of the Avtokrator Stavrakios, the great conqueror of two centuries before. Surrounding him in bronze and marble and the local golden sandstone were lesser figures. They all seemed to look to him for permission to stand there. It was an illusion, but an effective one.

Rhavas happened to be looking up at Stavrakios, too. Even with a pigeon dropping on his nose, the old Avtokrator looked like a tough customer. By everything Rhavas knew of him, he had been a tough customer. He'd made both the Halogai and the Makuraners fear him, no mean feat when they dwelt at opposite ends of the Empire.

A pretty woman leading a toddler dropped Rhavas a curtsy. "Good morning, very holy sir," she murmured.

"And a good morning to you. May Phos bless you on it," Rhavas answered gravely. The woman walked on. He eyed her with the same careful consideration he'd given to Stavrakios' statue. Phos' priesthood was celibate. Some priests, being men like any others, flouted the rule. Rhavas scorned them. Some kept it, though it ate into their flesh like the iron shackles around the ankles of slaves and convicts condemned to the mines. Rhavas pitied them. He usually wore the shackles of celibacy lightly, even proudly. Every so often, though ...

His mouth was never wide, nor particularly generous. Now it narrowed to a thin, hard line. He deliberately turned his back on the woman and her little girl. Out of sight ... Out of sight did not mean out of mind, not here, however much Rhavas wished it would. Though he looked at the woman no more, he saw her perhaps more plainly than ever.

He knew sin in others. Part of his peculiar sort of pride was to know it in himself as well. He sketched Phos' sun-circle above his heart and murmured prayers against the weakness of his flesh. Despite those fervent prayers, the memory of the woman's smile and soft voice lingered.

And then, in an odd way, the good god heard his prayers and answered them. Up from the southern gate, the gate farthest from the river, came a dispatch rider on a horse he lashed into a gallop, though it wasn't far from foundering. "Out of my way! Out of my way, curse you!" the rider shouted at anyone in his path. He flicked his whip not only at the poor horse but also at anyone who did not move out of the way fast enough to suit him. Cries of rage and pain rose up in his wake.

Here was something out of the ordinary. Rhavas forgot about the pretty woman as he stared at the dispatch rider thundering across the square. The man leaped down from the horse and tossed the reins to one of the startled sentries in front of the eparch's residence. Then, still on the dead run, he dashed inside.

Out of the ordinary indeed, and not a good omen, not at all. Something somewhere in the Empire must have gone badly wrong. Frowning, Rhavas hurried toward the residence. The sentries, even the man holding the lathered horse's reins, bowed low as he came up. "Very holy sir," they chorused.

The horse's sides heaved. Its nostrils glowed red as coals. Over its panting, Rhavas asked, "Did the courier say anything before he went inside?"

"Only that he had to see the eparch right away," one of the soldiers answered. Like his comrades, he wore a conical helmet with a bar nasal, a mailshirt, and baggy wool trousers tucked into stout boots that rose almost to his knees. He held a grounded pike in his right hand; a sword in a worn leather sheath hung from his belt.

"Not a word more than that, the miserable dog," another sentry added irately. He was a swarthy man with a wide forehead, a narrow chin, and sharp cheekbones: a typical Videssian, in other words. His indignation at the courier's silence was also typical. Rhavas had preached sermons on the Videssian love for gossip. He feared they didn't strike home as well as some of his other sermons. He might as well have preached against eating. Lust for gossip and news was as much a part of the Videssian character as a craving for good food.

Embarrassment suddenly heated Rhavas' cheeks and his ears and the shaven crown of his head. Why, here I am, guilty of the very sin I've thundered against from the pulpit, he thought. He promised himself penitential prayers before an image of the good god. Even as he made the promise, though, he wondered whether carrying it out would suffice to uproot the sin he'd found inside his own bosom. He hoped and doubted at the same time.

Stiffly, he said, "If the most honorable Zautzes learns anything I should know, I hope he will do me the courtesy of calling on me at my residence."

"I'm sure he will, very holy sir," one of the sentries said.

Rhavas was also sure of it. The civil administration and the temples stood shoulder to shoulder in ruling the Empire. And even if they hadn't ... Even if they hadn't, Zautzes would have been a fool not to consult the man who was not only prelate of Skopentzana but also the Avtokrator's cousin. Rhavas had no great love for Zautzes; the man was a lecher, and also overfond of wine, at least by the prelate's austere standards. But no one could ever accuse the eparch of being a fool.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Bridge of the Separator by Harry Turtledove Copyright ©2005 by Harry Turtledove. Excerpted by permission.
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